Combat ban lifted, but trouble is ahead

Updated 11:47 am, Friday, January 25, 2013

A longstanding Pentagon rule barring women from critical ground combat units that include the infantry and special operations was rescinded Thursday, but changes won't come quickly, and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans warned of rough times ahead for women and the military.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta unveiled the change, saying that, in tearing down barriers to women who want to serve in the military's most dangerous jobs, “we are making our military stronger, and we are making America stronger.”

Advocates agreed, echoing his view that ability — not gender — should decide who serves in 237,000 jobs that will open to women.

But others said women have struggled to serve as equals in a male-dominant military, and one sociologist warned the transition would be more difficult for the first women blazing the trail in once-forbidden specialties.

Former Spc. Kasey Hunter, one of only four women in an aviation unit near Baghdad in the Iraq war, said she was taunted about her breasts. Before arriving in Iraq, Hunter, then 21, said GIs took bets on who would sleep with her.

“I went into the military a very naïve, trusting, innocent girl and I came out something totally different,” said Hunter, a 2005 Churchill High School graduate. “Jaded, I guess, broken, I was just changed completely. Jaded, I mean angry at the world. I have a hard time trusting people, I'm very on edge and lots of anxiety.”

The policy change had been weighed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the past year and ends an era for a military that long had limited opportunities for women.

The services were told to evaluate their occupational performance standards and submit them in mid-May. The process will be completed in three years.

Women make up roughly one in every six of the 1.4 million active-duty troops, and they serve in a wide range of once-shuttered specialties, from the Air Force's Security Forces and Army medics to helicopter and jet pilots.

Only a relative few specialties remain closed, most of them tied to direct ground combat. But Anu Bhagwati, a former Marine Corps company commander, blamed the 1994 combat exclusion policy for much of the harassment women continue to face.

“Women deal with daily discrimination and harassment in large part because legalized discrimination exists in the Marine Corps and the Army and the Navy ... through the combat exclusion policy, so it's given rise to a culture in which it's OK for women to be told they're second-class citizens,” said Bhagwati, executive director of Service Women's Action Network.

Panetta said women ought to be able to serve if qualified, a view echoed by Bexar County Sheriff Susan Pamerleau, a retired Air Force major general, who said, “Each job is based on requirements ... and if a woman meets those requirements, then I think she ought to have an opportunity to compete.”

But Hunter, 25, of Belton, and Spc. Cody Nusbaum, an infantryman shot 11 times in Kandahar and now at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, expressed reservations, pointing to women who are posted in austere environments surrounded by men.

“My main concern is just the bickering and the I-liked-her-first sort of thing, because when guys get overseas and they've been away from women awhile, they get weird,” said Nusbaum, 23, of Camden, Ohio.

“I don't know whose idea it was to do this, but I feel like it's going to get a lot of people hurt,” he added.

“I like to call it the perfect storm, when you have men who have been separated from spouses, they're hyped on testosterone and aggression,” said Hunter, who said that NCOs and even junior soldiers made sexual comments to her.

Two senior Army commanders said surveys had shown shifting standards were a concern for GIs. Gens. Howard Bromberg and Robert Cone said it was important to ensure that standards were equally applied to men and women.

The Army is developing a universal physical fitness standard, as well as standards for each specialty.

Cone and Bromberg said strong leadership would play a major role in ensuring that women can compete for jobs in now-closed specialties.

University of Maryland military sociologist David Segal agreed, but said the experience of other militaries is likely to be repeated here — with women aiming high but too often falling short.

“It is going to be a more difficult transition than the lifting of don't ask don't tell,” he predicted. “It is a male-dominant culture with a history of sexual harassment and sexual abuse, and I think in the long run the change in policy is going to move the military away from that, but in the short run there are going to be a lot of bumps in the road.”